


An Elegant Sufficiency

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Discworld
Genre: Eating Disorder, Gen, Havelock breaks my heart sometimes, Insomnia, Recovery, hallucination
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:20:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24265759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: A heady, swoony feeling creeps up as the clock unsteadily approaches noon.
Relationships: Havelock Vetinari & Samuel Vimes, Rufus Drumknott & Havelock Vetinari
Comments: 6
Kudos: 47





	An Elegant Sufficiency

**Author's Note:**

> “The stars are like the lamps in illuminations, one would say that they smoked and that the wind blew them out... I flee without knowing whither, everything whirls and whirls. You feel very queer when you have had no food." -Éponine, Les Miserables

It goes like this.

He sets the Dis-Organizer for three thirty in the morning. The imp doesn’t have an imagination. It can’t hurt him. There’s a knife under his pillow and a dagger strapped to his forearm. 

The bed makes his back hurt and his joints ache but he can’t afford to sleep too deeply. He falls asleep with a ledger in his hand, eyes burning, the lines swimming. 

Sleep is a black well when he’s exhausted enough. Those are the good days. On the bad days he blows out the candle and stares at the ceiling and hears every sound and moves around because the bed is the wrong shape and there’s too many blankets and his mind won’t stop going, so, when his eyes have stopped burning, he lights the candle again and keeps working because he’s just thought of something and he has to do it right now. 

The night isn’t old here. It ought to be, because the sky is dark and the streets are narrow, but in the City the night is young. It is young and new until it is morning and, on the bad days, full of things to worry about.

Actually it’s the other way around. He sleeps after the bad days and lies awake after the good ones. 

He didn’t mind nightmares, as long as they stayed at right angles to reality. Nightmares meant decent sleep and that was to be appreciated in any form.

He wakes in darkness to the knowledge that it is “precisely, approximately half-three.”

He picks up what he was working on and is totally absorbed. 

Seventy minutes later he changes from a grey nightshirt to a dusty black robe, and cleans his teeth and shaves. The circles under his eyes are purple-blue and he wishes he’d learned to like the smell of makeup. He takes some comfort in how much shallower the vertical wrinkles in his forehead are than the horizontal ones. 

Then he goes to his office, writes seven terse letters demanding, reacting to or banning impossible things. 

A heady, swoony feeling creeps up as the clock unsteadily approaches noon. The worst part is that, sitting down, scribbling paragraphs and noticing that his left margin is a few millimeters wider than the right, it feels kind of nice. His face feels hot and he feels like he’s floating. He wishes he felt guilty for enjoying the sensation. 

Physically shaking, he adjusts his grip on his pen so his handwriting stays steady. 

The feeling passes. It only bothers him if he has to stand up for hours. There was one Guild meeting in the Rats Chamber where he felt awful and was certain he was going to pass out but no one noticed. He’d even tried to say something to that effect but they’d all been too absorbed in arguing and carefully not looking at him because they were afraid of him that it didn’t register. He’d leaned on the table, feeling like the floor had dropped out from under him. He thought of excuses to leave the room but he wasn’t sure he could walk that far. The meeting dragged on and he didn’t lose consciousness. 

He picks up a report from the watch and ignores the white smoke that appears to be curling up from the desk because he knows it isn’t there. 

The hallucinations had startled him when he first started seeing them. He thought they might be magical, but careful investigation had shown this not to be the case. He was just... seeing things that were not there. 

He doesn’t have time to worry about that. The only break he takes from keeping the wheels of Ankh-Morpork spinning is to drink hot water and eat a slice of bread. The Guild of Barber Surgeons, even at that time, would recognize the pride he took in the complexity of the rite of the bread’s creation as symptomatic. 

But he enjoys the work. Maybe he would be doing better if he didn’t.

  
\- - -

It goes like this.

He wakes up naturally shortly before five in the morning and watches the sunrise in the summer. 

The bed was only marginally less hard than the previous bed, yet he claimed anything softer _also_ made his back hurt. Drumknott found this far too amusing and had nicknamed him Goldilock for a fortnight.

Nightmares bothered him because he had more experience to have nightmares about and had also known good dreams to follow good days.

Before breakfast is a time for the possible, such as solving one or two people’s problems and convincing them they’ve solved it themselves. 

Exploding restaurants and things from the Dungeon Dimensions could wait until after he’d had a boiled egg or a bit of salmon.

He didn’t have the excuses he used to have. Sir Samuel would be personally insulted if he claimed to fear being poisoned or stabbed in his bed.

Regular meals still make his stomach hurt and him feel anxious, but it is getting better.

He is faster, sharper and keener with enough food and rest.

Noon is the oldest time of day. When the walls between worlds are thinnest and the sun beats down with the intensity that it did before plants made the air breathable. Fairies ride at noon and are powerful at Midsummer. In the City you could feel ancient daylight on ancient stones.

He was surprised when he realized the hallucinations had stopped, since they’d gone on for months and he’d gotten used to them. 

He plays slow, long-distance Thud and writes treatises and illustrates frontispieces and comes up with better solutions to problems when his mind wanders.

Coffee in the afternoon and a drink with dinner were inconceivable a few years ago, now they were quotidian pleasures.

Lord Vetinari would be the first to admit that these changes depended at least as much on having people around that would notice if you were hurting or take offense if you were hurting yourself than on arranging things so you were always the least-worst option. 

If he were to feel like he did that day in the Rat’s Chamber, Vimes or Drumknott would have cleared the room and held him and made him drink horrible sweet tea. 

But he’d done the work himself and it was still hard. He owed it to the City to try to be okay, and that made it better.


End file.
